The future is UAVs, not these overpriced proof of concept hotrods.
I would guess that the future of air warfare looks like a swarm of UAVs accompanied by a manned sortie, and an electronic warfare/flying command center in a Boeing product providing non-satellite-dependent coordination.
“The future is UAVs, not these overpriced proof of concept hotrods.”
A lot of this article is about F35 situational awareness advantages. Those are upgrades that ought to be modular to any plane. Or UAV.
For $100 million, I would hope the F35 is good at something. The question is still whether we wouldn’t be better off having a lot of avionics enhanced $15 million A10s and a few even better F22s for less total price.
If most of our battles are to be against Moozie camel humpers, I think the F35 looks a bit foolish. And if we are going against the Russkies or Chicoms, we’d be better off with F22s.
The F-35 was built with the capability for high-speed communication and control of multiple drones. Send and receive.
And has the computing power to execute the details of broad, high level instructions from the pilot.
“The future is UAVs, not these overpriced proof of concept hotrods.”
It’s been fair well demonstrated already that signal hacking is going to prevent UAVs from ever being anything more than high priced toys with occasional usefulness.
“The future is UAVs, not these overpriced proof of concept hotrods.”
There will always need to be humans at the scene for situational awareness. For air-to-air encounters latency can’t be too high, as it always is from halfway around the world - not to mention jamming etc. The Russians recently talked about a model where manned aircraft will be accompanied by multiple autonomous drones under the direction of the pilots - for instance the autonomous drone could be ordered to attack certain aircraft, and they’d proceed to do so without further communication.
The other thing to consider is that in order to have a UAV with the F-35’s capabilities (speed, range and weapons load) you need an aircraft the size of the F-35. The F-35 is actually “pilot optional” going forward, although granted a purpose-built unmanned fighter would be better.
I was sorry to see the Navy X-35 program get gutted - that was a monumentally stupid political decision.